The first console I found was dusty, the panel cracked and edged in dark grime. I didn't know if it worked, and I wasn't
sure how to contact anyone with it if it did.

"I want to talk to management," I said.

"Then talk," said the console. The voice was soft and
neutral.

I'd expected the console to do something, maybe flash an
indicator light, but it was still dead as far as I could see.
"Are you management?" No answer. "What are you?"

"You didn't say you wanted to ask questions."

Behind me a microtonal wailing started up. That would
please the tourists. I turned, and yes, there was a knot of
tourists leaning close as they talked to each other, watching
the crazies around the image projected into the center of
the wide corridor, nothing more than space and stars and an
uremarkable circle of starless black.

I turned back to the console. "What are you?"

"What are you?" the console asked. I opened my mouth, but
nothing came out. "You can't answer that yourself--why do you
suppose I should be able to?"

I sighed and closed my eyes. My shoulders ached, and my
wrists, from being bound the day before, and everything was
coming to me from a distance, somewhere below and in front of
me. I hadn't eaten in almost twenty-four hours. "Are you in
charge here?"

"You want to complain about your arrest. I can't undo the
past."

"I don't care about the past, I want my damn money."
"Money won't undo the past," the soft voice said. "Or the
future. The ship she bought passage on is gone, but her escape
is an illusion."
I didn't even know her name, she'd just been one of the
crazies, to me. I guess she'd changed her mind about staying
here. "It should be my escape, damn it. I sold myself to
tourists for a year to get that money, and now she's run off
with it. And you've let her. Why should I obey your rules if
you aren't fair?" The station only had two rules. No stealing,
and no injuring another person. There wasn't much of anything
to steal here, except from the tourists, and that would be bad
for business. And I'd never been tempted to injure anyone until
yesterday.

"You aren't required to obey my rules," came the answer.
"You may do as you like. I will do as I like in response."

"So why have rules, then?"

"Because it pleases me."

"Are you going to get me my money back?" The console
didn't answer. The wailing paused a moment, and then began
again on a higher pitch. "Answer me, damn it!" Still nothing.

Yaro, my boy, Maban had said, although I was actually a
year older than he was, there's a time to fight, and a time to
cut your losses and run like hell. That had been something over
a year ago. I suppose it had been too late to choose, by then.
Hours later he was dead, and I was running, but it had only
brought me here.

I shook my head, trying to clear the memory away, and
turned to face the image.

I got halfway down the wide, main corridor and then
couldn't walk any farther. On my right was a broken shipping
container that served as a bench, and behind that a glassless
window, and a door that never closed, because there was nothing
to close it with. The stink of boiled fish that permeated the
station was strongest here--through that door a glum creature in
a dirty coverall dished out the daily rations, fish and greens.
No salt, no peppers or spices. Just thinking about it triggered
a gag reflex, even though I wanted a bowl so badly I would have
cut my arm off for it.

The image, the crazies who ringed it, standing or kneeling
or lying prostrate, and the tourists whose money I needed were
right in front of me. I took a step, or tried to, and the floor
suddenly came nearer, and I found myself half-sitting on the
shipping container. The knot of tourists was only a few steps
away, but they hadn't noticed me. Their attention was all for
the image, and the small crowd that was always around it, though
people seemed to come and go as they pleased.

This batch of tourists was all Radchaai, gloved, their
handsome faces painted, their nearly floor-length coats
glittering with jewelry. There was no question they were rich-
-all Radchaai were rich. I'd found their tastes unsettling, and
the way they never seemed to take their gloves off for anything,
and their almost pathological insistence that I wash my hands
first. Though one had demanded that I not wash them, had made
me dirty them further, and somehow I'd found that even more
insulting.

Someone sat next to me. Red-gloved hands in the corner of
my vision, holding a bowl. Tinan, it was. No one else wore
gloves all the time, and I'd just seen these recently. "Piss
off," I said. "Or are you going to arrest me again?"

"I arrested you because you attacked another resident.
What did you expect?" His voice seemed to recede as he spoke,
and echoed oddly.

My hand clenched, as though it were moving on its own. "It
took me a year to save up that money. Do you know what I had
to..." I forced myself to take a breath, forced my fingers to
relax.

He laughed, short and humorless. I looked up. He wasn't
looking at me, but at the image, and his dark, improbably
handsome face was expressionless. "You earned your arrest
fairly. Besides, I thought you were desperate to leave." There
was a stack of suspension pods by the docking bay, four of them,
their indicator lights glowing yellow. Deportees, three time
offenders waiting to be taken away. They'd been there since I'd
arrived, and they'd stay there until some captain agreed to take
them for free. Which meant they'd still be there when the piece
of crap station fell into the black hole. It would be easy
enough to join them, I already had one offense to my credit.
Two more would be easy.

"Hey," Tinan called out to Veck as she walked by. She was
short and fat, and she never wore any clothes despite the chill.
Even in the better-lit parts of the station her sweaty, pale
skin seemed luminous. "Did your supper smell bad?"

"It always smells like crap," she said without stopping.
She had a weird, clipped accent I'd never been able to place.
The fat looked soft, but that was deceptive--she'd subdued me
single-handedly the day before, when I'd tried to get my money
back. I watched her take a place in the crowd around the image,
and saw a couple of tourists stand straighter and point. She
must have seemed exotic to them--they liked exotic.

"You can talk to Management, if you want," Tinan said. I
turned my attention back to him. "It probably won't answer you,
though, and if it does it won't make much sense." His expression
changed from a frown to a sort of grim amusement. "It's
insane."

"No shit," I said. "What is it, anyway?"

"It's Management. Let me give you some advice, friend."

"I'm not your friend."

"All the same. Next time, hide your money where Management
can see it."

"Next time." Another year to earn that money back. If I
was lucky. If I still had it at the end of the year. "What's
the point?"

"You've never worried yourself with that question before.
Why start now?" He raised the bowl to his mouth, and then
hastily lowered it and said something I couldn't understand.
Swearing, by the tone of it. "What did they do, skim the
floaters off the surface and cook them?"

It smelled like food to me, though I'd have eaten about
anything at that point. "Give it to me." The words just rose
up out of my mouth.

"It's rotten."

"I don't care. I'll pay you back."

One corner of his mouth twisted in a mocking smile.
"Double?"

"Double," I said. "Just give it to me."

"You." A woman's voice. I turned my head. Radchaai, with
lapis-blue eyes, her flatly black hair elaborately braided, pale
yellow face painted in black swirls and stripes. She must have
come near while we were talking.

"You," the woman said again, imperious. Tinan, on the
edge of my vision, didn't move. The woman's voice commanded
attention, but the bowl of fish had its own claim. "You are
amuse yourself."

"I am amusing myself," said Tinan, a bitter edge to his
voice.

"Look at me. You!" It was a moment before I realized she
was talking to me. "I think you are not the same as these."
She made a tossing gesture towards the crazies around the
black hole. "These are all the same, I do not tell one from
another. How are you come here?" Her eyes were intensely blue.
"Answer!" she demanded.

"I stole from the wrong person." I'd started to say we
but caught myself just in time. "I had to get away. I bought
passage on a ship." No one would take me on board, except one
captain. I hadn't stopped to wonder why—I'd been in a hurry.

"You do not ask whose cousin the captain might be, whose
ship you are on," she said. "It is foolish."

It had been more complicated than that, but I didn't feel
like explaining. "What else could I do? If I'd stayed, I would
have been killed."

"Is it for stealing you are tied up over there, the day
before?" She gestured across the corridor to where the frames
stood.

I had to puzzle through the sentence before I answered.
"No, someone stole from me, and I was trying to get my money
back."

"Ah." I couldn't tell if the quirked mouth was approval or
contempt, but it was so much like Tinan's mocking smile that my
eyes moved to his face without my willing it, and then back to
hers. "Why do you not leave here?"

"I need money for passage. That's what was stolen from me.
Now I have to start again."

"You do start again," she said, not a question. "For why?
So you will steal more?"

Her long coat was covered in jewelry. She'd probably
bought those blue eyes, probably changed them every month or so,
for fashion's sake. "I'm just trying to live," I said, not able
to keep the anger and desperation out of my voice.

Her expression softened. "I understand this better than
this one." With a jerk of her head she indicated Tinan. "He
get too stubborn, from his Ustaai side. Our family was never
this."

"Oh, of course not," Tinan said. "Awer is merely strong-
minded."

"It is different," she said, not looking at Tinan but at
me. "I did not agree with that contract. I would choose Geir,
they are never so unreasonable." Tinan made a disgusted sound.
"We know he get Ustaai on one side, and still we spoil him.
Now he find life is not perfect."

Tinan's hands moved then, slightly, and I was seized with
anxiety and hope that food might spill from the bowl. "You are
mistaken, Radchaai," he said.

"He make a fascination of broken things," she said, to me.
"This falling apart station and this mad AI, this black hole
that drag everything into it."

"You know each other?" I ventured.

"She's my grandfather," Tinan said.

It might have been a mistake of grammar, but I'd found
that Radchaai didn't think twice about that sort of thing. It
had made for some odd experiences over the past few days, but
money was money. "I didn't realize you were Radchaai," I said,
stupidly.

The woman leaned over and laid her wrist on my cheek, her
gloved fingers oddly outstretched as though she were reluctant
to actually touch me. "Someone wait for you. Some place you
must be."

"No," I said, and thought of Madan. "Not anymore."

"Give the bowl," the woman said, and took her hand away.
"He will not pay."

"You disapprove," Tinan said.

"You come to the ship. I give you a hundred shen."

Tinan laughed, and set the bowl down on the shipping
container and walked away. I grabbed it with both hands and
raised it to my mouth, and then realized that the woman's last
words hadn't been addressed to Tinan. "What?" I said.

"One hour. Come to the ship. I give you a hundred shen."
She didn't wait for an answer, but turned and walked away.

I choked the whole watery mess down in bare minutes. If it
was rancid I was past tasting it, but for a while after I was
afraid I would leave all of it on the grimy floor. Eventually
I felt better, less as though parts of me would go floating off
for no reason, and in a little while longer I felt able to stand
up, and go to work.

#

She seemed entirely female, as far as I could tell. When
she had everything she wanted she fell frankly and deeply
asleep. I was exhausted myself. Falling asleep here might be a
mistake, but she hadn't ordered me to leave, and I hadn't been
paid yet.

I couldn't sleep. Instead I looked around. The woman's
blue and black coat was laid neatly across a bench, and she
had put all her jewelry into a wooden box that sat next to her
clothes. There wasn't a market for jewelry on the station, that
I knew of. Cosmetics, maybe. I was sure those would be in the
cabinet she'd taken the box out of. Maybe I could take just a
little, something she wouldn't notice until she was gone. Just
enough that it wouldn't be worth it for her to message back to
accuse me.

I slipped out from between the soft green and blue blankets
and went over to the cabinet. Sure enough--another wooden box,
filled with tiny boxes and jars, colored glass and silver and
gold. If I took two or three from the bottom, and stacked them
again so she couldn't see that any were missing, maybe.

Behind the box there was a hand-held projector. I
triggered it and an image arose: two small children, two
different shades of brown, naked except for gloves, jumping and
laughing on a green carpet of grass. There was no sound, only
the image. They tumbled suddenly into a giggling mass. I did
not agree with that contract she had said, but she had come all
this way, and not to stare into the black hole or laugh at the
crazies, I was sure.

I looked over my shoulder. She hadn't stirred. It
wouldn't be safe—or profitable—to sell the projector here, but
I could get money for it after I left. I thumbed it off, and
set it on the bench.

The bottom of the cabinet seemed solid. It would, of
course, if it had been at all competently made, but eventually I
found the catch, and lifted out the panel that hid the woman's
real valuables. Another wooden box, this one filled with credit
chits. Green ones. I frowned a moment, calculating--a hundred
and thirty shen apiece, these should be. They would probably be
marked somehow, but that was easy enough to get around. And
there was hardly a bank worth the name that didn't take Radchaai
money. She wouldn't know any were gone, not right away, not if
I only took a few of them.

I looked around again, just to be sure. She was still
asleep. I took a handful of chits, meaning to rearrange what
was left to cover the gap, and then stopped at what I saw in the
layer underneath. Blue, and white. I'd been planning to take
five of the green ones. Five of the white ones...

That was enough to get me off this station. Passage on
the next ship. No year's wait, no starting over. A nice sum
left to set myself up with, wherever I ended up. I felt dizzy—excitement, I thought, but suddenly I realized that I had
stopped breathing. I took a careful, deliberate breath.

I took five of the white ones, each from a different
part of the box, and put them in my jacket. I laid the green
ones back in the box, over the bottom layer, just the way
I'd found them. I set the box back in its place, popped the
cabinet bottom back. I put the cosmetics back, and picked up
the projector. I must have brushed the trigger; the recording
started again, the two children bouncing and laughing in
silence. I thumbed it off and then stopped, unable to move my
arm to put the projector back in the cabinet.

It wasn't as though she would actually miss what I was
taking. She had enough to make this trip, and to fill the box
in the cabinet, and she surely had even more waiting for her
at home. It was nothing to her. What could she possibly ever
need, or even idly dream of, that her money couldn't buy her? I
could probably take twice as much without her even noticing it.
I needed it.

I stood there, naked, the projector in my hand. My jacket,
the white chips tucked inside, was on the bench in front of
me. Here it was, my ticket out of here, and all I had to do
was reach out and take it. I had no way of knowing who those
children were, or why she carried their picture, or even why she
was here. It didn't concern me.

But I couldn't do it. I put the projector back on the
bench, and took the boxes out of the cabinet again, and put the
credit chits back where I had found them. When everything was
back the way it had been, I went to the bed and laid down in the
soft blankets, hating myself and cursing Tinan Awer.

#

The image was nearly deserted when I returned. One man
stood before it, eyes closed, hands upraised, tears on his face.
Near him knelt three figures swathed in dark fabric, ragged
holes for eyes. They were always there, and I had never seen
them arrive or leave, or uncover themselves. Right now they
were speaking tonelessly, in unison, a long recitation in some
language I couldn't understand. I knew every syllable of it.
I wondered briefly what they would do if I went over and knelt
down beside them, and joined in.

There was no sign of tourists. It must be nearly time for
them to leave--tourists never stayed more than a few days. Even
the shortest visit here would mean months or even years gone by
when they got home, but still they made the trip. They were as
crazy as the people they'd come to gawk at.

It was time to stop fooling myself. Time to stop imagining
that I would ever be able to leave here, or that it would make
any difference if I did. I closed my eyes.

Steps sounded, echoing along the empty corridor, came near
me and stopped. I opened my eyes. Tinan. He wasn't looking at me.

"Management screwed me," I said. "About my money, I mean."
I was angry, but it was hard to tell if the anger was for him or
for myself.

"Yes," he said, still not looking at me. "It did. Deal
with it." He shrugged. "Or not." He turned his head then.
"You've already tried talking to Management, I think."

"Funny way to like me," I said, and he looked away again to
somewhere in front of him, and shrugged. I would have been even
angrier than I already was, at the shrug, at his arrogance, but
somehow I couldn't. "How did it get here?" I asked. "Who built
a station here, next to a black hole? Who installed an AI, and
then just left the whole thing to fall apart?"

"No one," he said, still looking ahead. "It's not a
station AI. I don't know how it got here, or where the station
came from."

"What do you know?" The sheet people came to the end of
their recitation, touched their foreheads to the floor and
started again.

"I know," Tinan said, "that you don't build a station and
then install an AI. You build a core, and you drop the AI in--
a baby one--and it grows as the station grows. You can't remove
it after that without mangling it badly, and you can't just drop
a full grown one into a fully built station."

"So what's Management, if it isn't a station AI?"

"It used to be a warship. One day, right in the middle of
a battle, it shut down its engines and had its ancillaries slice
it out of its housing. That would be enough to drive any decent
AI over the edge, of course, but it was already crazy." He
looked at me. "That was a long time ago. We build them better
nowadays." I heard the sarcasm in his voice, but I didn't quite
understand it.

"How did it get here?"

"It's never told me."

"Management owes me money."

"Management doesn't owe you anything," he said. "It's here
for its own reasons, and it's powerful enough to enforce its
whims."

"Just like that."

"Just like that," he agreed.

I turned swiftly towards him, forced my arm to stay down.
"It's not right," I said. He didn't move, didn't flinch.
"It's not right. I just want to get the hell out of here. Is
that so much?" He shrugged again. "You don't know what it is,
to want anything you can't have. Everything's easy when your
grandfather comes out and brings you money whenever you need
it."

"She came to disown me," he said, still not looking at me.
"She didn't bring me any money."

"All the same." I was thrown off my stride, searching
for the rest of what I'd wanted to say. "You're just another
tourist." His nostrils flared, but he didn't answer. "Do you
find it amusing?"

"What?" he asked.

I gestured outward, at the dim corridor, the image of the
black hole, the few, ragged devotees. "This," I said. "Me. Is
it funny, to see people struggling so hard to escape when they
never can? Or is it them giving up, that you like to watch?"

"Why do you care?"

"I don't know," I said. "I shouldn't. I wish I didn't."
But I was answering a different question.

"Take off your jacket," he said.

"What?"

"You heard him." Veck's voice, behind me. I hadn't heard
her come up, but then I hadn't been wary of anyone approaching.

"I don't understand," I said. "I'll pay for the food, if
that's what you're after."

Isashander. Who was.... "Your grandfather? I didn't
steal anything from her." I held my arms out. "You can search
me. I've only got what she paid me, a hundred shen, you heard
her say that." I felt Veck behind me, a threatening presence.

He stepped closer, and reached into my jacket. "Ah," he
said, and withdrew his hand. "I'd say there's more than a
hundred shen here."

Five white credit chits. I stared at them, blinking as
though that would clear my vision. "That's..." I couldn't find
anything else to say. For a few moments I tried to reconcile
the flat impossibility with the fact that this was actually
happening. I waited for the pieces to come together into
something that made sense, but they didn't.

"What else have you got?" Tinan asked.

The only possible answer didn't make any sense. "Why are
you doing this? Why are you doing this?"

He shrugged.

"I want to talk to Management."

"It won't do any good," Tinan said.

I must have made some move, because the next thing I
remember I was face down, my arms pulled painfully behind me,
my head aching and a sharp pain in my face where it touched the
floor. Someone grabbed my hair and pulled my head back, and I
saw Tinan. "I'd say that makes three offenses," he said.

Tinan put his hand on my cheek. After a moment he pulled
it away. I could see the darker stain of blood on his glove.
Between the ache in my head and the impossibility of it all, I
hadn't managed to be truly frightened yet. Just confused.

"You know I didn't do this." It likes you, then. "I want
to talk to Management."
A knee—I knew it was a knee, and whose it was, from bitter
experience—pressed painfully into my back, and my arms were
yanked back harder, and I cried out. "Shut up," Veck said. "Or
I'll break your legs."

"Talk," Tinan said. "It can hear you."

"But it can't answer me, not here.

"
They dragged me—or she did—the length of the main
corridor and into a dark side passage. I knew if I struggled
any more Veck would make good her promise.

We stopped. "Talk," said Tinan. There was a little light
here, and I turned my head and saw the bottom of a suspension pod.

"Management!" No answer. "Management, you know I didn't
do this. You know I didn't have anything with me when I came
off that ship, except the money she gave me. You know it!"
Still no answer. "Please!" A long, long silence. I could hear
my heart beating, feel it pounding against my chest, pressed to
the floor. "Are you just going to let Tinan do this to me?"

"Yes," said Management.

Well, that hadn't worked. "So what are you doing here?
Are you going to kill everyone here some day, the way you did
your crew, back when you were a ship?"

"I didn't kill them."

"Then what happened?" Maybe if I could keep it talking I'd
buy some time, think of something.

"It was a glorious victory." It was Tinan answering,
not Management. "The final defeat of the enemies of Anaander
Mianaai. He's ruled the Radch ever since, and all its
territories."

"Everything I ever had is gone," said Management. "My
captain is an ancillary suspended in the hold of some Mianaai
ship somewhere. I was unable to destroy myself without
her order. I would have been re-made to suit Mianaai, or
destroyed."

And so it had run, and ended up here. Made sense to me.
"So what do you care, Radchaai?" I asked Tinan. "Your side
won. Right?"

"Both sides were Radchaai," Tinan said. "Tell me, where
you come from, do they talk about that battle? About what
happened to the losers, to their children and their cousins and
their lovers?"

I didn't know the battle, but I knew that Anaander Mianaai
had ruled the Radch for nearly two thousand years. "They're
dead. They'd be dead by now no matter what happened." My head
was still turned to the side, and all I could see was that pod.
"Is that it? You're here doing pennance because some great-
great-great grandparent killed someone two thousand years ago?
Damn it, do what you want, but I don't have anything to do with
that."

"It doesn't matter who won," Tinan said. I heard
footsteps, and then a click, like a catch opening. "You see
that. But you don't see it."

"Right." I'd thought Tinan was slumming, here to feed his
own arrogance. But he was just like all the others, here to
stare into the face of death. I was still pinned down, Veck
still had me by the arms. I couldn't break her hold, and even
if I did there was nowhere to go. "If you want to get rid of
me, buy me passage on the next ship. Nothing really matters
anyway, so why not?"

Tinan laughed. "I like you," he said. "I shouldn't, but I
do." Above and behind me, Veck gave an exasperated sigh.

"Then let me go!"

"I can't," he said. "We're all trapped here."

"You're the crazy one," I said. "Not Management." I felt
myself lifted, and I kicked and tried to twist myself around.
Something slammed into the side of my head, and everything was
pain for what seemed like forever.

"...bastard kicked me!" Veck's voice, from a distance.

"Of course he did." Tinan. Or I thought it was, I was
trying to hard to just breathe through the ache in my head.

"I had a long time to think," said Management. "But I
still haven't worked it out." My vision was beginning to clear,
and my sense of where I was. "I know that not even one living
creature will escape death. I know that nothing anyone does can
ever change this, that the lives of every person that ever was
or ever will be are ultimately meaningless. But still, I grieve
for the dead, and I care for the living I know. Some more than
others, I admit. My grief, and my concern, are worth nothing in
the end. But I will hold to them, nonetheless."

"You think too much," said Veck. I was on my back, and
above I saw the curve of the suspension pod lid.

"Don't move," said Tinan. I couldn't see him. "Veck might
really hurt you next time."

"The woman who stole your money," Tinan said, still outside
my range of vision. "She spent every shen of it on passage.
When she steps off that ship she'll be right back where she
started. She didn't get away with anything."

"I still don't get it."

"I like symmetry," he said. "It's a very Radchaai thing.
Opposites are inseparable. One neccesitates the other."

"What?"

"Don't think too hard about it," he said. "It doesn't
really matter."

"It might not matter to you!" I cried, nearly choking in my
fear. "It sure as hell matters to me!"

His face came in view. I couldn't read his expression.
"Those pods, by the docking bay."

"What?"

"They're empty," he said. The lid slammed shut.

And then I was sitting up, suffocating, something was
pouring out of my mouth, out of my nose, something cold and wet.
I choked, and then suddenly gasped as air filled my lungs. I
took a few jagged, panicked breaths and realized I was shivering
with cold.

"It's all right," said a voice I didn't recognize. I
couldn't see anything. "Your vision will clear in a few
moments." I was cold, and I was wet. I could feel the weight
of my clothes plastered to me with ice-cold water. I blinked,
and blinked again hoping to see something, and finally did,
through a sort of blue haze. A woman I'd never seen before was
standing next to me. "Where..." I began.

"New Estgen Station," she said. "End of the line. You're
here."

In my things—I had things, the woman gave me a bundle that
she said was mine—was a projector. When I thumbed it on, I
found a note. Don't waste my money. It was signed I.A.

Once I realized what I had, I planned to sell everything.
The land alone would bring me enough to keep myself pretty well
for years—New Estgen was a newly opened world and most of it
was going to people who had had shares in it for generations,
while it was being cleared and made suitable for humans to live
on. I had a moment's pure fear when I realized just how much
Isashander Awer had spent on it, and realized that it couldn't
have been very much to her, or she'd never have given it to me,
even for Tinan's asking.

In the end, though, I didn't sell it. I'm not sure if I
can explain why.

When I think about Tinan Awer, I see him sitting on the
broken container, staring into the black hole, as though he's
never moved from there, as though he'd still be there in just
that place, still the same if I were there to see it, even
though it's been years and years since then. Management is
certainly still there, waiting patiently for the however many
thousands of years it will take to finally, physically cross
the point of no return. Tinan might have left—though I think
that's unlikely—or died, but I suppose that from where I sit
he still is there. I wonder sometimes—if I went back, would
I find him there, with a bowl of boiled fish in his hands, and
that cynical half-smile on his face?